Think Creative

This is the first of hopefully many debates inside the Creative Thinking arena. You can participate or view the outcomes as they unfold. Please contribute, as most people have an opinion and it would be good to hear it. I have moved the discussion here as it has the opportunity to create a wall of discussion. When leaving comments please add your name. You don't need to have an account, simply choose "Name/URL" and supply your FaceBook ID as the name. Couldn't be easier! First subject in this two weeks will be 'censorship'. For many years as a youthful creative I was always an advocate of non-censorship. Remembering the hidden religious control of the British Board of Censors as they deemed things inappropriate due to their middle class, church going attitudes. I thought that there was nothing wrong with showing things that were viewable in real life, in the confines of adverts, films and television shows. However, as I have grown older and a little wiser I ...

Second subject to discuss. The human form is something that is the most natural part of our life. We are in fact born naked and then for some reason of climatic need, or social obligation required to don clothing. This was the point of one of Toscani's first and most shocking photos for Benetton. To highlight the public repulsion to our own naked form. Many things have happened over the centuries that have driven or modeled the way we see ourselves as a form, but it was only in the beginnings of the advertising era that the human form took on a new angle. A device for selling. One of the things that has become apparent over the last few decades of advertising this form, is that our liberation toward it has in some aspects become reflective to the forms shown in the utopian view on billboards, etc. However, there is a great deal of distaste seen in the way the human form is used ( even if to good affect ) in some advertising and graphic forms. It is questionable whether advertisin...

Advertising and graphics have a power above all else. The expression "a picture speaks a thousand words" is testament to the fact that the visual form is a strong method to get a message across. In fact since we climbed from the trees and tried very desperately to communicate, one of the first things we did was to make marks on walls and in sand. These pictograms eventually turned to the multitude of alphabets we now use around the world, with some confusion between races. However, the visual form is in-all-tense-and-purpose a universal tool. Something that can be recognised from one mind to another, the world over. This in one sense makes it a very powerful tool, but at the same time makes it a very powerful weapon. What ad men have been argued at is not having is morality. Whether that is true or not is another debate, what they do have is the obligation to sell the product that is placed in front of them. To this end they could be faced with dealing with some very hard a...

The last theme in this two week stretch. Thanks for all who have viewed, if not commented. Thanks to Panagiotis for his contribution. Strange thing is I see him in class, and therefore could have had this debate off the computer, but never mind. For the final subject I wanted to start the notion of 'to what levels would a piece of graphics go' to sell its message. I am a great admirer of the author Marshall McLuhan and his book 'Understanding Media'. If you are interested in Creative and Lateral Thinking with relationship to the medias then this is a book you should read. Several of the chapters he talks in have many aspects to the values of the visual medias and in particular he talks on the 'medium is the message'. This whole philosophy is a little deep and hard to add to a short blog post, but basically it is the notion that our society has devised ( consciously or subconsciously ) the methods by which a combination of words and structures have moved from t...

Decided to finally get through the last bit of 'Blink'. Malcolm Gladwell's book on the spontaneity in human nature. On reading one of the final chapters I came across a very interesting section covering the concept of what can be called 'Consumer association'. This was an original concept founded by Louis Cheskin. See his website  here ! He moved to the USA from the Ukraine and found great delight in the development of the American culture. However, he discovered a desire to want to analyse the system by which consumers related to their choice in products. One of his achievements was to aid Coco-cola in their understanding in why Pepsi was beating Coke in the race for customers in the late 1970s. Coke was under the assumption that the rival was true in their statement, in that in the taste test ( something I remember as a child ) Pepsi was better than coke. So Coca-cola spent time and money in the development a new taste. They even called it 'New Coke'. Wh...